


"you owe me a drink"

by Feather (lalaietha)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-04
Updated: 2014-04-04
Packaged: 2018-01-18 03:20:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1413133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve runs into one of the chorus girls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"you owe me a drink"

**Author's Note:**

  * For [staranise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/gifts).



> Written in early 2013 as silly commentfic and posted to AO3 at request of a friend; apologies for any infelicities.

"Captain Steve Rogers," says a female and slightly wobbly voice that makes Steve look up from his sketch-pad to stare into very dark brown eyes in an old woman's face, "you owe me a God-damned drink." And then the old woman sits down in the chair opposite him, hands on her cane, and glares at him like he's offended her. 

It takes him a minute. It takes him a lot of minutes, actually, staring at her and blinking and trying to make sense of why an elderly lady with the parchment-soft skin and totally white hair of age (pulled back into a French-braid and still long, which as far as he can tell is unusual these days) and slightly trembling age-spotted hands would be glaring at him like that or using his name and rank. It takes him a minute to see just the eyes and for his memory to supply makeup and take away crows feet and paint her lips bright red and makes him say, stupidly, " . . . Dora?" 

She smiles, and it is Dora, it is utterly Theodora Small - or, oh god, she'd probably be married wouldn't she? he doesn't even know her name anymore - except she's eighty. Got to be eighty, it'd be eighty, right? Maybe even older, fucking (pardon him) Hell. Now that he knows it he can absolutely see it, see that the skin of her cheeks hasn't even fallen that much and you can still see where she was a pixie-cute bottle-blonde with the tiniest wrists - 

"I knew it was you," she says, sounding rather smug. "Carol kept trying to insist it had to be a grandson but first of all I couldn't quite believe anyone but that British officer of yours could have got you into bed and we'd've been invited to the wedding and second of all I was pretty sure that magical cocktail of yours would keep you young for eternity." She sniffs. "I always said you were a selfish bastard for not sharing any. Now where's my drink?"

He gets her a gin-and-tonic and himself a beer and completely throws "classified" out the window (although he does keep his voice down) to tell her why he's still around but does regretfully tell her he can't let he know anything more about New York than the public already knows and happily endures a few minutes of grousing about it. Then he listens with three quarters delight and one quarter pang of deep regret while she fills him in on her life in the last few decades, starting with the man she married at the end of the war ("biggest God-damn mistake of my life and you know what I thought the night I picked up my baby girl and walked out back to my mothers? I thought Theodora, girl, Steve would have broken this bastard's nose already and then begged your pardon afterwards", and Steve agreed that was probably true) through the man she married who got himself killed being "an idiot hero" in Venezuela to the man she's still married to and still loves in spite of the Alzheimer's and visits at his hospital every day, the five (in the end, after all three men) kids she bore and two she lost and all the grandkids she got out of the other three, along with what it was like working as a teacher and a nurse and finally a bank teller. 

"And I have to tell you," she adds, "my granddaughter, she's got what they call a learning disability, she's badly dyslexic and she wanted to be an aerospace engineer and kept insisting she wasn't smart enough. And I have to tell you this because about the third time she said that in my hearing I said Georgy, I said, you know I did the show-girl thing during the war. And she said yes of course I know, Gramma. And I said, Georgy, I once knew a man who changed his name five damn times and went to five different cities because the army kept turning him down and after that fifth time he went a sixth time and you know who that man was? And I dragged out the old album and I showed her your picture." She leans back in her chair, looking smug and says, "And guess what she is now." 

Steve can't help smiling and guesses, "An aerospace engineer?" 

"Damn right," Dora says, even smugger. "She's working in Europe. Everything got pretty exciting after aliens tried to kill us all, apparently, and right now she's working on a project headed up by another woman, a Dr . . . Dr Forester?" 

Steve blinks. "Foster?"

"That's right, Foster," Dora says. She gives him a shrewdly amused look. "And she can't tell me a single blessed thing about what she's actually doing these days either, so you probably know more than I do. If you ever run into a Georgiana Phan while you're out saving the world, tell her who you are and that her bà ngoại says _so there_."


End file.
